Learn Ethical Hacking from Scratch

Wordlist cracking

Now that we've captured the handshake from our target AP and we have a wordlist ready to use, we can use aircrack-ng to crack the key for the target AP. The aircrack-ng is going to go through the wordlist file, combine each password with the name of our target AP, and create a Pairwise Master Key (PMK). The PMK is created by using an algorithm called the PBKDF2, it's not like just combining the password and the BSSID; it's encrypting them in a certain way, and it compares the PMK to the handshake. If the PMK was valid, then the password that was used is the password for the target AP; if it wasn't valid, then aircrack-ng tries the next password.

We use aircrack-ng, the name of the file that contains the handshake, test-handshake-01.cap ...